Chris Ware
Chris Ware is an American graphic novel illustrator. He has won several awards for his work, and he was the first comic artist to have his art exhibited in the Whitney Musuem of American Art. Some of his influences are Winsor McCay, Frank King, and Joseph Cornell.His graphic novel Jimmy Corrigan, The Smartest Kid On Earth, won the Guardian FirtsBook Award in 2001. This was a great acheivement for him because it was the first time that a graphic novel had ever won a major book award in the United Kingdoms.
Picture found on Wikipedia
Chris Ware describes his work:
"I arrived at my way of "working" as a way of visually approximating what I feel the tone of fiction to be in prose versus the tone one might use to write biography; I would never do a biographical story using the deliberately synthetic way of cartooning I use to write fiction. I try to use the rules of typography to govern the way that I "draw," which keeps me at a sensible distance from the story as well as being a visual analog to the way we remember and conceptualize the world. I figured out this way of working by learning from and looking at artists I admired and whom I thought came closest to getting at what seemed to me to be the "essence" of comics, which is fundamentally the weird process of reading pictures, not just looking at them. I see the black outlines of cartoons as visual approximations of the way we remember general ideas, and I try to use naturalistic color underneath them to simultaneously suggest a perceptual experience, which I think is more or less the way we actually experience the world as adults; we don't really "see" anymore after a certain age, we spend our time naming and categorizing and identifying and figuring how everything all fits together. Unfortunately, as a result, I guess sometimes readers get a chilled or antiseptic sensation from it, which is certainly not intentional, and is something I admit as a failure, but is also something I can't completely change at the moment."
Here are some really good resources on Chris Ware and his work:
Acme Novelty Archive: The Unofficial Database of the Works of Ware
NNDB Profile: Chris Ware
I personally think that Chris Ware is an important visual artist because of the way he relates visuals to text. He has a very unique perspective on how these two crucial elements of comics interact with each other. I also think that he is important because of the recognition he has received with his work. For a comic book artist to gain that kind of attention is outstanding.
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- hot topics last edited on 19 November 2006 at 6:34 pm by c-71-205-70-111.hsd1.mi.comcast.net